The Riviera has gotten hooked on the old Bogart image lately. There’s the African Queen next door to the Key Largo, and Sam’s Place in Monte Carlo, and half a dozen other spots where you can drink or dine under his sleepy, cynical scowl.
Crow was gazing at the yachts as if he’d been studying the picture and practicing that look.
“Waiting for Nathalie?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “She’s in Paris. Flew up a couple days ago. Decided she wanted to confer with some department store fashion directors and merchandise managers.”
“On a weekend?”
He shrugged.
I kept it casual. “When’s she due back?”
“I don’t know,” Crow said carelessly. “Depends.”
He didn’t sound as if there was anything about his wife’s departure, or his not knowing when she would come back, that troubled him.
But then, Frank Crowley was a deceptive guy in many ways. For example, like a lot of short people, he was packed with more energy per inch than most of us—but most of the time he didn’t look it. Any more than he looked like he had the physical strength to carry somebody my size two and a half miles across rough terrain under unfriendly fire.
Maybe he’d put me down a lot. He never explained how he’d accomplished it, and I didn’t know, because I’d been unconscious the whole way. I knew it was two and a half miles because that was the distance between where I’d taken the grenade burst and the forward medic tent where I came to a long time later. I knew it was Crow who’d done it because one of the medics told me he’d brought me in slung over his shoulders. And that he’d passed out from exhaustion after setting me down.
Later I’d gotten a chance to ask Crow why he’d done it. He didn’t say that I’d have done the same for him, because neither of us knew if that was true. You don’t know what you’ll do in combat situations until you find yourself doing it.
What Crow did tell me was, “Hell, it was getting too damn grisly up there where you got clobbered. Taking you back was my only excuse for getting myself the hell out of there. Even got myself a couple days R and R in a nice comfortable tent while they were sewing you back together. Until they caught on I was malingering. You were still sleeping it off when they kicked me out.”
Sacre Crow. As slang, sacre can signify either magnificent or damn-fool. In Crow’s case, both.
Jean-Claude sent a waiter out with our drinks. We clinked glasses. Just the feel of the frosty glass against my palm was a pleasure. Even in the shade of the awning the midday heat was enervating, down there at sea level. Later there’d be the relief of the updraft between sea and mountains. But right then there wasn’t a hint of a breeze, and the hot air felt almost solid. I squeezed the glass in my hand, tinkled the ice cubes inside, and took a swallow, relishing the cold sliding down my throat.
I said, “I hear you sold out your half of the business.”
Crow nodded. “Who’d you hear it from?”
“Mona.”
He grinned crookedly. “She thinks I’ve gone crazy. And she’s done her best to persuade Nathalie of it.”
“Your wife has a tough mind of her own. I’ve seen her tell Mona to butt out of her affairs a number of times. About as rough as you can get.” I smiled at a memory. “Even when she was a kid she could make her mother back off when she dug in her heels.”
“In this case she seems to agree with Mona. I tried my best to explain my reasons. They’re really very simple ones. So simple Nathalie can’t believe it’s that simple. She’s sure there has to be something deeper and darker behind what I tell her.”
“Try me,” I said.
He looked at his watch again, and then toward the parking area. Whoever he was expecting wasn’t in sight. He drank some more of his iced scotch. “I was sitting outside a café in Nice one afternoon. On the Promenade des Anglais. Reading my Herald Tribune, at first. Then just watching all the pretty people going by on their way to and from the beach. You know, this area has some of the best looking people in the world. Must be the mixture of French and Italian blood.”
I nodded agreement. “Nathalie’s one of the best-looking examples.”
“That’s for sure. Well, I suddenly realized that I’d been sitting there doing nothing constructive for almost two hours, and that I’d better get back to the office. Back to all the problems that never end when you’re running a company like that.”
He paused and squinted at me, looking for signs that I was tuned in. I gave him one of my understanding looks.
He continued to study me when he spoke again. “And then I thought—why? I mean, why did I have to go back to that pressure cooker? With all those decisions to be made? And all those employees waiting for me to make the right ones? Hell, it was getting to the point where that’s all I ever thought about. Constant anxiety—nights, weekends. Even my dreams were full of it. That’s why I rented that space in Nice a year ago and turned it into a photography studio and darkroom. I know everybody figured I was overindulging myself, putting that much dough into what’s supposed to be just a hobby.”
“Not me.” I gestured at the rows of yachts. “Look at all the people sinking fortunes into these boats, and most of them not using them more than a few weeks a year. They can afford it, so nobody thinks it’s weird.”
“That’s the point. I can afford it. That’s what hit me that day on the Promenade des Anglais. That if I didn’t go back to the office I’d still have a roof over my head and wouldn’t go hungry. So I went to my studio instead. Spent the rest of the day cropping and blowing up pictures I’d taken of some little forgotten villages up in the mountains that tourists never get to. I didn’t finish until midnight-feeling tired but great. From doing work that was purposeful and at the same time enjoyable. So I decided. Sell my half of the company and get enough out of it to last me comfortably for the next ten years. And by then maybe I can build my hobby into my new profession. A more easygoing one that won’t give me ulcers.”
“Makes sense to me,” I told him.
“I figured it would,” Crow said. “I’ve heard you talk about quitting the detective business to start your own vineyard.”
“If and when I get a big enough chunk of money together. So far I haven’t, so we can’t be sure if I’d really do it. You do have the money. And you earned it. You’re entitled to take your shot.”
Crow sighed and sipped his scotch. “I wish everybody else saw it that way. Especially Nathalie.”
“You’ve got to give her time to adjust to the new you, Crow. She thought she was married to a genuine American powerhouse. Nathalie’s something of a powerhouse herself. What you call anxieties she regards as challenges. She likes taking them on. She thought you did, too.”
“I did. I don’t anymore. My change of life, I guess. It began to get to me when I saw my fortieth birthday coming. Half my life over with. At least half. And what I was doing wasn’t fun anymore. Just increasing amounts of obsessive worries. I want to spend whatever’s left of my life doing something that challenges without putting that kind of strain on me.”
I smiled at Crow. “In one American’s immortal words: Go for it.”
He smiled back. “At least I’ve got you and Rocky in my corner.”
“You’ve got Gilles, too. He was trying to calm Mona down this morning. He understands what you’re doing.”
“I know. Couldn’t have a better brother-in-law than Gilles. After you, my favorite guy.”
He meant it. But I got a feeling that the subject of Gilles made him uneasy for some reason. Moments later I knew why.
Crow looked again toward the parking area, and this time he saw the person he was expecting.
She came toward us wearing a Mona Vaillant design—a short, semi-fitted jacket over a billowing cotton peasant skirt, her honey-colored hair upswept to show all of a face that was still as breathtaking as when she’d been a top fashion model in her early twenties.
It was Gilles’s wife, Anne-Marie. A long way from Antibes, where Gil
les thought she was spending the day sailing with some friends.
* * * *
She was surprised to see me there with Crow. But she recovered quickly and kissed me. When I kissed her back she pulled away with a mocking shake of her head. “Don’t advertise if you’re not selling.”
It was a joke that went back a long way between us. She kissed Crow next, but only on the cheek. Maybe because I was there.
Anne-Marie had been single and making a fortune as a model when I’d gotten to know her in Paris. We had a torrid but short-lived affair that simmered down to an easy friendship. When she learned I knew Mona Vaillant she asked for an introduction. Anne-Marie had been taking art and design courses between her modeling assignments. She knew she couldn’t expect to live off her looks forever.
I arranged for her to meet Mona and the rest of the family. We had begun to think Gilles was destined to be a lifelong bachelor when Anne-Marie stepped into his life. She dropped modeling for marriage and an apprenticeship in the Mona Vaillant atelier. Being Gilles’s wife helped, naturally. But without real talent she would never have worked her way up to being Mona’s assistant designer.
The romance between Gilles and Anne-Marie had cooled off somewhere along the line. I thought I knew what the problem was, but there was nothing anyone could say or do to cure it. If it wasn’t for their son, Alain, they would probably have split by now. They were both crazy about the kid, and neither wanted to get shunted into becoming a part-time parent.
If Gilles had a mistress or occasional lovers, he handled it with extreme discretion. I was sure Anne-Marie hadn’t turned celibate; and from what she’d told me a year before, there wasn’t much—if any—sexual pull left in their relationship. That was the night she’d made a pass at me—half clowning, semiserious.
I had fielded it as entirely clowning: “What kind of man would go to bed with his friend’s wife?”
She had given me an exasperated smile. “A Frenchman. But I keep forgetting, you’re only half French. That American puritan streak keeps butting in to spoil things.”
I hadn’t seen much of her in the year since. Crow asked what she’d like to drink before lunch.
“Nothing,” she told him. “I’ve had a few already. On an empty stomach. I should get some food inside me before I have any more.”
Crow called to Jean-Claude to send out menus. Anne-Marie glanced at me uncertainly, obviously worried that I intended to lunch with them. I stood up and said I had a date. I have been known to lie when the occasion demands.
Anne-Marie blew me a farewell kiss. Crow said, “Don’t disappear on me again, buddy. I could use more of that friendly ear.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I promised.
They both looked relieved to see me go. I couldn’t be sure of what was going on. But judging by surface impressions, Mona Vaillant’s family seemed to be unraveling and re-knotting itself in complex ways, faster than I could keep up with.
It disturbed me. Hindsight later told me that it should have disturbed me a great deal more.
But even in retrospect, there wasn’t anything I’d learned in Beaulieu—nor earlier in Monte Carlo—that could have prepared me for what I found late that night in the bedroom of Crow and Nathalie’s house.
* * * *
From Beaulieu I drove back east above the coast, stopping off at Eze-sur-Mer for lunch and then returning to my house and the repair job on the faulty water-tank valve in the attic. The job took a couple hours, and I still wasn’t sure how long the repair would hold before I’d have to install a new valve. When I finally climbed down the ladder from the attic I was grimy and dripping a couple pounds’ worth of sweat. I scrubbed the worst of the grime from my hands and face and went for my swim.
I got to it later than I’d originally planned. The sun was lowering, and the late afternoon breeze had begun to blow. But in midsummer that didn’t matter. The sea was still warm, with a little surface mist stirring. The water wouldn’t cool off enough to be uncomfortably chilly until the early hours of next morning.
Once I was out beyond the capes that sheltered the cove below my house there were no other swimmers. That didn’t mean I had the sea to myself. Motor yachts cruised past, leaving oily wakes. A couple dozen tiny boats from the sailing school in Beaulieu were out there practicing tacking maneuvers. Further out, a big Canadair swung down from the sky and skimmed the surface, its twin engines droning as it scooped in a bellyful of seawater. It lifted off sluggishly and flew away to dump the water on a forest fire raging in the mountains above Menton. Minutes later another Canadair arrived to scoop up another five tons of water.
We get a lot of those fires every dry summer. The only way to douse them, that far back in the mountains, is with the Canadairs. Southern France currently had a dozen of them and badly needed more.
They kept me from going out as far as I’d intended. A few years earlier a man had disappeared while out there swimming. The law firm of Henri and Joelle Bonnet had engaged me to investigate his family’s claim that he’d been scooped up by a Canadair and then dropped with the water on a fire—drowned in the belly of the plane and then burned up. The body was never found, I didn’t come across anything to substantiate the claim, and the Bonnets persuaded the family to drop the case.
I swam back to the cove and climbed to the house feeling refreshed and pleasantly fatigued, all inner tensions temporarily drained away. After showering and getting into jeans and a sport shirt I drove up to Roquebrune, where Jules and Anne Cardinal had invited me to share their Sunday dinner.
The atmosphere in their home was as pleasant as the meal. Jules and Anne remained a contented, relaxed couple, oblivious of the fact they were violating the general trend. That started me thinking again about Frank and Nathalie Crowley—and Gilles and Anne-Marie Vaillant. So when I left the Cardinals and reached the Crowleys’ home I stopped—just in case Crow had more to get off his chest.
And found the house apparently empty, though the lights were on and the door was open.
And walked inside—and to the main bedroom.
* * * *
The dead man sprawled naked across the bed was August Pilon.
The naked woman who had been killed trying to escape was Anne-Marie.
Chapter 6
I looked at the way Anne-Marie lay there, half-curled on the carpet near the bedroom doorway. She wasn’t beautiful any longer, though the inevitable deterioration had not yet begun and her face and figure were still the same. A dead person is never attractive. It is not like looking at a lifeless statue. There is a visceral revulsion you can’t help experiencing at the sight of someone who has abruptly ceased to be a complicated individual personality and has become instead an emptied corpse.
It is worse when the person killed was someone you knew well. The revulsion is compounded by a jolting reminder of your own mortality and an angry refusal of some part of you to accept it.
I reviewed once more, swiftly but in detail, everything that had been said and everything I’d sensed when I had been with Crow and Anne-Marie that day. Then I went back over what had transpired after I’d seen August Pilon with Mona Vaillant: my conversation with Mona, and then with her and Gilles. I came up with a number of contradictory possibilities and hunches, but no answers. No hard facts that told me why Mona Vaillant’s detective and daughter-in-law were dead.
One thing was certain: I damn well had to try to get hold of Crow and have a detailed discussion with him before the cops got involved.
I went to the living room phone and called his studio in Nice. After ten rings without an answer I gave up. Another possibility was that Crow might be with his former business partner, Gilbert Promice. There had to be a lot of loose ends to be dealt with concerning the change of company ownership. I knew the number for the company’s main office, but all I got there was an answering machine asking me to leave my name and number so my call could be answered when the firm opened for business next morning.
I decided to try Promic
e’s home. In the middle of dialing information for his number I hung up. The light from the living room had reflected the uniforms of two gendarmes approaching across the pool patio.
I crossed the room to meet them as they reached the open sliding door. Raymond Thibaut and Jules Garnier, from La Turbie’s tiny gendarmerie. I knew both. A private detective can’t function unless he has friendly relations with as many cops as possible.
“I was just phoning the gendarmerie to ask for you,” I said.
They weren’t surprised to see me in a house they knew wasn’t mine. A gendarme’s job is to keep the peace in his rural area—dealing with trouble when it occurs, but also trying to prevent it. That requires being acquainted with the residents of the area and with their interrelationships. They knew I was a close friend of Crow and Nathalie.
“Are Monsieur and Madame Crowley at home?” Garnier asked me.
“No.” I answered the next question before it was asked: “I was passing and saw the lights on and decided to visit them. This door was open, so I came in. The front door is unlocked, too.”
Thibaut frowned as he scanned the living room behind me. He looked like he’d been wakened out of a deep sleep.
“We got a phone call. A man who wouldn’t give his name. Said he doesn’t want to get mixed into other people’s troubles. He claimed he was out walking his dog and heard gunshots from this house.”
Garnier said, “But we do have our share of false alarm callers. This could be one of them, making the whole thing up.”
“Not about the shots,” I said, and I led them to the main bedroom.
They took a long look at the bodies but did not move to touch them.
Garnier asked me, “Do you know who they are?”
“Anne-Marie Vaillant and August Pilon.” I explained who they were but couldn’t explain what they were doing in the Crowley house together, alive or dead. I was still working on that question myself.
Thibaut grimaced. “It’s going to be a fat mess. We’ll have half the detectives of the region on top of us.”
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